How Trump's White House Is Driving a Wedge in the Pipeline Debate

If you're not following labor historian Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, then you're paying for your own in this shebeen. (This goes double if you're not a regular reader of his weekly feature, "Erik Visits An American Grave," which is fascinating if admittedly macabre.) On Tuesday, he put up an excellent post explaining how it is that the leaders of building trades unions came out smiling from their meeting with the president*.

He gets a little Socratic explaining things, and does a fine job returning his own serve.

Do the Laborers or the other building trades have nonwhite members? Yes they do. Does McGarvey or O'Sullivan prioritize the civil rights of those members? Evidently not. Do they prioritize a livable planet? No. Do they think they need allies in the rest of the labor movement or the broader left movement? No. Do they wish it was 1910 again? Yes. Do they hate hippies? Yes. Do they have tremendous power within the AFL-CIO? Yes, very much so. Are they acting in their members' best interests? No. Do their members see it that way? Largely, no.

Loomis then explains how these all-day suckers are going to get wedged away from the provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act through what they think is their own cleverness, and he is scathing in his evaluation of the place of these particular unions within the dwindling power of the American labor movement. But there's one quote from Sean McGarvey, head of the North American Building Trades Union, that's worth studying closely. From The New York Times:

"We have a common bond with the president," Mr. McGarvey said. "We come from the same industry. He understands the value of driving development, moving people to the middle class."

Is he kidding? The president's chief skills in business were a) slapping his name on things; b) gaming the bankruptcy laws; and c) stiffing the subcontractors, some of whom presumably are represented by Mr. McGarvey's union. They are in "the same industry" in the same way that Bernie Madoff and the Mets were in the same industry.

Anyway, as Loomis points out, it is clear that building a bunch of pipelines was part of the bargain that was struck on Monday. The administration confirmed that on Tuesday. (Also part of the bargain will be the fact that there's going to be hell to pay along the routes.) The administration is all in on not only the Dakota Access pipeline, which is bad news for the folks sleeping out in the snow on the prairies, but also on our old friend the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and Republican fetish object—although there are local issues in Nebraska, including the fact that there is no approved route through the state yet, that will make that more difficult. Nevertheless, the divide between labor and the environmental community has become such an effective wedge that even this White House noticed.

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Of course, their political utility doesn't make pipelines any safer, or the companies that build and run them any more honest. As it happens, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel recently ran an investigation of the 60-year-old (!) system of pipelines that brings oil through the Great Lakes, the largest concentration of freshwater on the planet. Those pipelines are old and they're currently being run beyond their stated capacities.

There is nothing on the continent like this ever-expanding pipeline network, owned by Canada's Enbridge Inc. and its subsidiaries, and not just because it runs to the shores of the Great Lakes, a drinking water source for some 40 million people. "The Enbridge Mainline system is the largest in the country," said Paul Blackburn, an attorney who has represented a number of environmental groups in legal battles, including against Keystone XL. "A lot of oil goes through there. Much more than people understand." In fact, the system's current capacity is equal to roughly 20% of the nation's total oil imports. Enbridge also has plans for a new thousand-mile pipeline from Alberta to Superior that would add another 370,000 barrels per day to that flow, bringing the capacity for some 3 million barrels of oil to flow into Wisconsin each day.

Regular visitors to this shebeen will recall that Enbridge is that company that just can't seem to keep the oil within its pipelines. (In 2010, an Enbridge pipeline blew and dumped 683,000 gallons of glop into the Kalamazoo River. That cost $1.2 billion to clean up and the company settled with the EPA for $177 million.) It runs a risky business and clearly believes that there isn't any capacity it can't buy itself out of.

When Enbridge's first line through Wisconsin, Line 6A, opened in 1968, it had a capacity of roughly 300,000 barrels. Today it has a capacity of nearly 700,000 barrels. The line itself never got larger. The volume boost was achieved largely by cranking up pressure on a steel tube that is today nearly 50 years old.

Line 6B, a sister pipeline to 6A, burst in Michigan in 2010 and spilled more than 1 million gallons of tar sands crude. It was the largest on-land oil spill in U.S. history. Enbridge later decided that the existing line, which also began operating in 1968, was too deteriorated to salvage. So it shut it down and opened a new version of the line in 2014. This replacement actually doubled the old line's operating capacity at the time of the spill to 500,000 barrels per day.

I have a terrible feeling that pipelines and extraction industry goodies are going to be the heart of whatever stimulus package this White House produces. The rest—roads, bridges, airports etc.—likely will be in the form of tax credits and giveaways. Meanwhile, the leadership of important unions will be pitted against environmentalists in a sorry testosterone-count spectacle.

Sooner or later, we will lose part of the Great Lakes, but there will be jobs cleaning it up, so it's all good.

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